The Jordan Harbinger Show - 371: Maria Konnikova | Pulling Off the Biggest Bluff

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

Maria Konnikova (@mkonnikova) is a regular contributing writer for The New Yorker, a bestselling author, and an international poker champion -- a title she earned while researching her latest book, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. What We Discuss with Maria Konnikova: How Maria went from being someone who had no interest in poker to raking in big bucks as an international poker champion. How people make decisions and what poker can tell us about reading human motivation. How to spot real physical tells at the poker table (and real life). How we can control and prevent emotional thinking (aka "going on tilt"). Why, in poker as in life, triumph is your foe, and disaster is where you learn. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/371 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Don't dwell on the shit that you can't control. Figure out what you can do. Figure out what you are actually capable of changing. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's sharpest minds and most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. I want to help you see the matrix when it comes to how these amazing people think and behave.

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Today on the show, we'll learn that gambling is tough on our brains. Statistics and probabilities are extremely abstract and hard to fathom for humans. We just aren't evolved to see them readily. But poker is a game of skill in many ways embodies how the human mind works best, especially when it comes to decision-making. Poker probabilities are what they are. They're not designed by a game designer, and this will break you out of your illusions. At least so says, my friend, poker champ, and author Maria Konnikova.

Today we'll explore how humans, make decisions and what poker can tell us about reading human motivation. We'll also outline some real physical tells at the poker table. I couldn't believe it, but it has to do with your hands, not your face, not your eyes, none of the other stuff. And it's pretty amazing how you can put this into action. We'll also explore how we can control and prevent emotional thinking or tilt, as they call it. And we'll learn why, in poker as in life, that triumph is your foe and disaster is actually where you learn. I loved this book.

I loved this conversation, and I know you will too. And if you're wondering how I managed to have a network that includes friends like Maria Konnikova, it's because I use systems and tiny habits to maintain my circle, my network.

Check out our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. No upsells, not enter your credit card free, just free, free. Again, over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course right there on the website. Most of the guests on the show, subscribe to the course and the newsletter.

So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. All right, here we go with Maria Konnikova. Why did you decide to become a professional poker player again? How did this happen to you? I'm still asking myself the same question. Initially, I had no interest in poker and came to this project because I was interested in luck and in trying to figure out how do we learn the limits of our own control? How do we learn where our skill ends and just chance begins?

it's a really, really difficult thing to figure out in real life. Life is so noisy. There's so much going on. And you can always just kind of BS your way through it and say, oh, well, that wasn't my fault. And yeah, I'll take credit for that. Thank you very much. So it's just noisy. It's messy.

So I wanted something that would help me disentangle that. Someone suggested that I start reading about game theory. They're like, if you're interested in chance, you know, game theory is a good place to start. So I ended up reading John von Neumann's theory of games and learned that von Neumann was both a poker player and someone who believed that poker was the perfect game for looking at strategic decision-making in life. So by all accounts, he was a really horrible poker player, but he was a brilliant mind and a brilliant mathematician and the inventor of game theory and the computer and the hydrogen bomb. You know, so many things this guy did. Just brilliant.

Just not a great poker player. But he said poker is actually the perfect game for human decision-making because it's a game of incomplete information. So there are things I know, there are things you know, there are things we both know. I need to try to figure out what you know, what you think I know. And so I'm playing the person. I'm playing the situation. Wait, this really intrigued me. And I thought, let me read more about this poker thing.

I did and decided, hey, you know what? This is my book. Why don't I learn poker? Why don't I immerse myself in the world that I want to write about and see if, with the help of someone really good, I ended up choosing Eric Seidel, who's one of the the greatest poker players of all time. And luckily, he agreed to be part of this project. I said, why don't I actually see how far I can go? And it was supposed to be just a year of us working together. And I ended up becoming good and winning a major international title and getting a sponsorship from

poker stars and joining team pro and somehow found myself as a professional poker player. That is, I've known you for several years. And so you know what I mean when I say, that is kind of ridiculous, right? No, I mean, it's not kind of ridiculous. I think that is ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. Like, what in the world is this even? Yeah, it's like saying, you know, I want to learn a little bit about soccer for this book. Oh, I'm just going to go work with Cristiano Ronaldo. And, oh, Manchester United wants me to play for them now because I got good. Yeah, that's actually kind of what happened, except I'd be absolute shit at soccer. I have very little actual athletic ability and zero hand-eye coordination. I'd be.

better at soccer than at baseball, though, because the thought of a ball going toward my face just petrifies me. I think the first pitch, I'd just go, you know, duck down. And that would be the end. That's true. That would be the end of my baseball career. Yeah, you get hit with a soccer ball in the head. You don't have to go to the hospital, generally speaking. So yeah, you'd be a little better up. So you wanted to learn poker to learn, among other things, decision-making as a skill, sort of maybe to disentangle luck versus skill in our daily lives or in your daily life, maybe? That's exactly right. Because when I tried to do it before, when I was at Columbia, I studied decision-making when I was getting my PhD in psychology. And it was really fascinating because I saw lots of really, really smart people making really silly types of mistakes. So when you put them in an environment with a ton of uncertainty and what I actually did was had them play stock market games where they had to pick different stocks and bonds and trade them. And I would then play tricks on them, like, settle. the stock that used to give a lot of money would suddenly become bad with some percentage of the time.

So the rules of the game would change. And I found that really smart people and people who were good at investing. So we actually, we worked with both students and with professional investors to get data for this, that they oftentimes failed to see that, failed to change their strategy and thought they were more in control than they actually were. So they suffered from something called the illusion of control. So I saw that actually smart people in real world situations, and sure this was a game, but it was noisier than poker. I mean, stock market simulation, that they would often go wrong. Like they'd take credit when things were going well and they discount it when things weren't. They're like, oh, this isn't my fault.

You know, my strategy is great. You know, there's something wrong with this program. Right. Yeah, the real market doesn't behave like this ever. Exactly. No, that's exactly right. They would say things like that. It was just kind of astounding to see that.

So you just said it as a joke, but this was a literal quote that some people said. I believe it because nobody would say that playing blackjack. Like, oh, the dealer never gets 21 three times. Yes, of course it happens. Like, have you played blackjack before? It happens all the time. Exactly. So I saw in poker an opportunity to actually cut through some of that noise.

Yeah. Because you can't be like, oh, well, you know, I made the right decision getting in, you know, my pocket sevens against pocket aces. Right. No, you didn't. I mean, maybe you did. It depends on how the action played out. But, you know, you were not a favorite.

You can actually start to figure out, okay, how do I look at my decision process and how do I separate it completely from the outcome? Because there are elements I control, right? I control how I play. I control, you know, whether I choose to play a hand. And if I play it, how I play it, you know, am I going to raise? Am I going to call? What am I going to do?

You can control your reactions. You can control your thought process. But you can't control the next card. You have no idea what cards coming out next, unless you're cheating. You know, unless you've marked the cars. And in that case, you know what car is coming next. But if you didn't do that, then all of a sudden, you know, you could make the best decision possible and get your money in as like a 75% favorite and then bingo, 25% happens.

And you know what? 25% is a lot. It's going to happen a lot of times. And you're going to lose and the outcome's going to be bad. But your decision was good. So that's fine. And sometimes it'll flip and you'll actually get your money in and you'll see, oops, I'm a dog. I'm 75% to lose.

and the miracle card comes, and oftentimes it's easy to forget and be like, oh, I'm a genius. I knew that card was coming. But if you keep thinking like that, you're going to go broke eventually. If you keep actually thinking that you're a genius and you knew you were psychic, you knew that magic card was coming, then you're going to lose all your money. So really what you have to do is, okay, I screwed up. Why did I screw up? How do I fix my process?

So instead of using statistics and math or only statistics in math, you actually wanted to use psychology and human behavior to win at poker. And that's a unique take because I think a lot of people go, oh, there's a lot of people who've studied poker, what's the big deal? But you even talk about some of these, I don't know if they're statisticians, but they kind of play that way, where they've got some simulator at home and they just memorize all the combinations of cars they have. And they go, okay, I'm 50% to lose right now or 50% to win or 75% like you said before. And they just play those numbers. But you've got a different take, which is I'm going to see if I can use my PhD in psychology to win at poker, which your grandma was a huge fan of, apparently.

Yes, my grandma was a huge fan, remains a huge fan of what I'm doing. I think she thinks that I sold my soul to the devil. But yes, I mean, I think all the best players know you need both. You need both the mathematics and the statistics and the psychology. But depending on whom you ask, you'll get different answers. Because there are some people who will say, you know what, you really don't need the psychology. A lot of that is just bullshit. And like, just know the math really well and work with yourself and you'll be great. Then there are the other people who think, oh, all those math guys, you know, pot odds are all you need. Like, all that is crazy. I play the man. I play the situation. And I think there's an in-between. But I do think that it's really important

to use your strengths, use what you know, what you're good at. I took my last math class in high school. I am not a mathematician. I'm a writer. Even in psychology, people are like, oh, but you did stats. I was like, actually, no, I hired a statistician to do my stats for me. I paid someone to do the stats. I didn't do them, which is great. It's actually good research methodology because they're not biased. They don't know what you're looking for. So that's totally legitimate, but that's what I did. So my math background, I count on my fingers, literally. I still count on my fingers. My math has gotten better with poker, but I'm not going to be competing with a stats PhD. Ain't happening. And I know that. And my strength is psychology. So I figured, why don't

I use what I know? And then sure, I'll supplement it with the math. I'll do my best to learn that, but I'm never going to beat those guys at their own game. So why don't I just try to understand what they're doing? And instead of trying to beat them that way, try to beat them using the things that I know a lot better than they do, which is the psychology of decision making, which is how the mind works, which is how people react to emotional situations. And so that was the way that I approached it. You say in the book that it's not the best hand in poker, it's the best player. So the best hand doesn't win most of the time. Most of the time it's a skill-based decision. Or did I read that incorrectly? No, that's absolutely right. In fact, according to one study that several economists

ran of hundreds of thousands of hands that they analyzed in online poker, the best hand won 12% of the time. Really? So that means the best player won 88% of the time. And over two-thirds of the time the hand didn't even go to showdown, which means that someone won without ever having to show their cards. And so that just goes to show how much of a skill game it is and how often people just outplay you, you know, and you end up folding the best hand. Or if you're the good player, you can win with crap. And that to me is just the quintessential reason why is a skill game, because you mentioned Blackjack before. You can't do that at Blackjack. You need to have the best hand. Sure, you can calculate your odds and know like when you're supposed to double.

and all of these things. But at the end of the day, if the dealer has 21, you lose, unless you have 21 too. Like, there's no way to win with 18. There's no way to bluff the dealer and be like, I think I have the stronger. But in poker, you can. That's such a huge difference. That just shows the difference between gambling and poker. Is it essentially there's a very finite limit to skill then in blackjack where, like, as soon as you know some of the rules and some of the strategies, you're kind of done. You don't need to watch. 30,000 hours of blackjack tournaments or if that even exists to learn how to kick ass. Are there blackjack tournaments? I don't know. Now I'm fascinated. I doubt it. Why would there be?

Right? It's like it's your grandma against my mom and myself and we're all equally probably going to have the same odds and it's not that exciting. True. I love these little psychological concepts about the description experience gap. The idea that we tend to go on what feels right versus Is data, I mean, isn't that like what being human means almost in this day and age? Absolutely. I mean, we are really not wired for statistics and probabilities. The way the brain works is through experience. So if I sit here right now, so if someone listens to our podcast and we start talking through like

some math stuff, they might think they understand while they're listening. But unless they've actually experienced it themselves, it doesn't really register nearly as much as experiencing something and actually going out and saying, okay, let me play poker, let me feel this for myself. And so normally, since we learn much better from experience, we end up having completely incorrect statistical intuitions because if something happens to us once, we overweigh it. So we think, oh, well, you know, I need to prepare for this. Like, you can think about our ancestors. You know, they see a tiger in the bushes when they're going, picking berries in those bushes. And they say, oh, we can never.

go back here. And if someone were to suddenly appear and say, actually, statistically speaking, tigers here are incredibly rare, this was an anomaly, and the tiger will only be here 0.5% of the time, they'll be like, screw that. I don't know what that is. Like tiger, bad. I'm not coming back here. So we learned from that personal experience and not from someone telling us, actually don't worry about it. That was a very rare occurrence. And you know what? It was smart because the people who went back probably got killed by the tiger. Right. It's a whole like reproductive DNA type of scenario. Exactly. Exactly. And so, but that persists now. And so if we haven't experienced something ourselves, we really underweight it. So I think we were seeing it right now with COVID

with some people, actually, people who know people are often, you know, they understand the risks. They're like, okay, you need to wear a mask. This is important. But then you have parts of the country that weren't affected with the first wave or weren't affected a lot. And they're like, oh, this is a hoax. This is stupid. I don't need to worry about it because I personally don't know anyone. So I don't care about these statistics. I don't know what the R is. You know, I don't care about any of those numbers. All I care about is that I'm fine. And that everyone I know is fine. Description versus experience. That makes sense. The example you give in the book, I think, is 9-11, where people who were kind of around or paying attention to that or maybe in New York for that, they're often much

more scared of terrorism or a terror attack. And then other folks that are maybe a little bit more removed from it or just focus more on stats are going, look, the odds of anything happening on an airplane are this. And it's like, well, yeah, but I was in a almost plane crash one time. So I'm never getting on a plane again, which you don't really argue with people like that. Like, it's hard to do that. Like, oh, yeah, you crashed in Africa in the bush that one time, but you're on a small plane. This is a commercial airliner. No, I'm just going to go, well, I'm not really going to argue with that. You almost got a plane crash. What are you supposed to do? Like, it's really hard because our experiences are emotional in a way that descriptions totally are not. You are going to think that I'm

just a horrible human being if you're telling me about your crash experience. And I'm like, did you know that your risks of dying by slipping in a bathtub are actually orders of magnitude higher? You'll be like, screw you. You must be fun at parties. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Who are you? Like, you must be fun at parties is the perfect put down line there. I've gotten it a lot at Twitter. Yeah, I can only imagine. Yeah. But what I was going to say is that poker actually cures you of a lot of that because you're sampling probabilities correctly. So you actually get to feel what 1% feels like, what 2% feels like. It's really cool.

It's something that's really helped me internalize different things that I now see on the news. I can actually think back in my mind, oh, well, that's about equal to the probability of hitting a pair on the flop. Okay, I know what that is. Like, I actually, I can feel it. That is fascinating because I wondered if you brought poker thinking into your daily life. And you're like, oh, this is like a, what is it, a capped range or something like that. Yes. Caped range is a great concept to actually use that.

Use in real life. A capped range, all it means is that given what this person has done, they're capped at how strong they can be. So basically, you know, if you know that someone always raises, or for talking poker, always raises their strongest hands. So like aces and kings, they're always going to raise them before the flop. 100% of the time and they didn't. You know they're capped. They can't possibly have those hands. So the best hand they can have is something that's going to be worse than that. And so that helps you eliminate certain hands from their range. If you apply that correctly to life, you can actually save yourself a lot of woe and realize when people are trying to bluff you, you're like, wait, you know,

if you actually were going to walk away from this negotiation, you would have acted this way and this way. So you're capped. You're not going to walk away from this. The way you've acted caps your range of actions, caps what you actually are bringing to the situation. It's a really good way of analyzing, like, okay, how would this person have acted if they, in fact, have what they're representing versus not? And it's also good to know that for yourself so that you can try to avoid those inconsistencies yourself so that you don't have to go, oh, shit. I would have played that differently. I use this in negotiation where I'll collect a huge amount of information. And a lot of friends of mine who are also in business, they'll go, look, man, you're just psyching yourself out by getting all this extra information.

But what I'm looking for a lot of the time is something, and I never thought about it this way, but it's something that would cap the range. So, for example, maybe the other party says, look, we don't need to sell this to you. But I already got information from another party that has nothing to do with our negotiation that says, yeah, we just bought three million impressions for this sponsor. from this network and I go, ah, they need me to fill in like a million of those. They actually really need me a lot right now. And it's between me and another show that this other person said they already signed with their network. So they can't get them. They want me to think I'm competing, but I'm not really. So you actually also just hit on something that is such a crucial thing to realize that poker actually helped me realize, but you can learn it away from the table and it really

applies. Information is power. Everything is a game of information. If I can get an informational edge on you, if I can know something that you don't or that you don't know that I know, then all of a sudden my advantage has just quintupled. So here, you actually were able to get an informational advantage and they did not know. They actually didn't realize that you were good at doing your research. That's just so important. It's like why when you actually pick up a tell on a person, which is very rare, so when you actually figure out, oh, wow, they do this when they're strong or they do this when they're bluffing or whatever it is. And if you can actually do that, you can't tell anyone because the moment this person is aware that you know this,

it stops working. That's interesting. You have to keep your information to yourself. The description experience gap is essentially what leads us to believe what we want to see, not what the research shows. So again, we don't look at the stats. We go on almost like a feeling. That then sabotages our, is it our perception or at least the results of our perception, where we start to believe things that we kind of wish we're there? That's a really, really interesting question, and it's a really nuanced question. So you're getting at something that psychologists have tried to tease apart for a long time. Do you actually see the world differently?

And I think the answer is yes, because I think that you just selectively focus on the information that already agrees with what you want to believe. So this is called the confirmation bias. So you think you're looking at everything objectively, but actually you're only looking at the information that agrees with you, and you're not even seeing really. You're just completely discounting the information that doesn't. So if you did like a Google search and the first hit agrees with you, you're like, I'm done. And you didn't look at anything else. Now, if you see the first hit disagrees with you, then you'll start doing more research and finding the ones that

agree with you. You keep going down the list. This sounds like conspiracy theorists that are like, oh yeah, well, Google is mainstream media now. You can't even go on YouTube. You got to go on bit shoot and then watch plan demit. Yeah, okay, now you're just looking for things that reinforce your argument. This isn't what research really is, but people don't know that. That does explain quite a bit. You mentioned that when you were going into poker, that the job market was actually the risky play. But with poker, it's more meritocratic. Can you tell us about this? So I'd never intended to go on the academic job market, but I could have. That's what happens after you get your PhD, you kind of go on the job market, you interview at different universities, and someone

decides whether or not they want you to teach there, to be a professor there. And it's very competitive. And people think, especially, you know, especially my grandmother, but people think that academia is just this really respectable meritocratic thing, you know, the smart people. And that poker is just like D-Gen gambling. However, there is so much both politics and academia. When you go on the job market, you are so subject to the prejudices of the people. doing the hiring. Do they like the person who was your advisor and who's on your dissertation committee? Do they agree with the kind of research you do or not? And by the way, you can actually, this doesn't have to be academia. This can be any kind of job market. Does the person like the

person you used to work for? And do they like what you're studying? Does it actually mesh with their view or not? Maybe they're doing something that actually kind of goes in a slightly different direction. And so they're like, oh, don't hire Maria. She's actually horrible. I think she's a horrible worker. And it's not true, but they say that because they want to protect their little area. And so they don't want me to be hired. I don't want somebody whose research says that I might be wrong in some way possibly, because then it furthers their career. Yeah. Exactly. And then there are also the things like, oh, you know, was the person interviewing me the day they were interviewing me, were they just getting over the flu and they just didn't want to be there? And so they're completely not receptive to what I'm saying.

Or did they already see a candidate that they loved? And so even though they might have loved me more, had I gone first, I didn't go first. And so I never have a chance to prove myself. And they've already kind of decided. Right. They were hungry when they interviewed you. Exactly. What if I remind someone of their ex-wife? And they're like, oh my God. Like, I can't work with her every day. Exactly. Exactly. And they probably don't even think of it consciously. They probably think that they're being totally objective. But these biases operate on a subconscious level. So at the end of the day, it is completely not meritocratic. It's all about knowing the right people, doing the right work, kind of being in the right moment at the right time. Poker, on the other hand, especially tournament poker,

if you can afford the buy-in, great. No one cares where the hell you went to school. No one cares what you look like. No one cares what you did or didn't do. They're not allowed to say, unless you've been banned from the property for cheating or something like that. But assuming that there's no law enforcement reason why you can't play, they can't say you can't play. And as I write in the book, you rise and fall on your own merits. So there are people sitting in a lot of at the table, some of whom have Ivy League educations, others of whom dropped out of high school and had to wrestle with homelessness and all sorts of issues and built up their bankroll from $10 and ended up being so good that they took that $10 and are now millionaires.

That's amazing. It is. And that's the only place that I've actually found where that's true. Now, like I said, nothing's a perfect meritocracy, right? So it obviously matters where you were born, who you are. You know, some people don't even get to figure out that they like to play. poker or that they're good at it, it obviously helps to have some parental support. A lot of these things are helpful. Yeah, there's still privilege involved. Of course. There's still privilege involved. And luck. Exactly, always. But it's the most meritocratic thing I've ever seen. That to me is interesting. As a person who looks at poker and says, well, gambling is pure luck. And then we're saying,

well, actually, it's more skill. And then this area that requires all this skill is actually more meritocratic than say academia, which theoretically is supposed to be, the word probably comes from that somewhere. Merit is probably some academic word that I don't know from Greece. I don't know. Likewise, I also do not know those words. When you think merit, you think medal, award, achievement, accolade, like all of that is usually associated with the centers of learning, which now you're saying are not as meritocratic as sitting around a table with a bunch of guys jeering at you for being a woman and you kicking their ass because you have better skill. Yep.

Yeah. It's kind of cool, right? I have a one-word answer to that, yep. We'll get to some of that later, maybe. The best poker players don't take things personally, you said. They also know how to take lessons from their losses instead of looking to blame someone else. That's a skill I think people need in life

because we have to do the same thing. Otherwise, I do find that a lot of people, and I'm sure we all have this friend or had this friend, who everything is someone else's fault, Therefore, they can never grow. I've had people like that in my business. I've had business partners like that that still years later are Jordan screwed us over and that's why we're not doing well.

And I'm like, I started from zero two and a half years ago again and I'm doing better. So like, wait a second, what's going on here? They spend a lot of time blaming others. I spend a lot of time analyzing my mistakes in business rather than looking for someone to blame. And that was a lesson that was sort of hard one for me, honestly. Yeah, I think it's hard one for a lot of people. And I think it's also something that one has to constantly work at because it's very easy to fall back into bad thought habits and to start blaming other people.

I remember reading these psych studies about basically you had to work in a group and the researcher would rig the results that you were told that your group didn't perform as well. And then you had to explain what happened. And inevitably, everyone would say, oh, I worked really hard. It was my other group members who dragged us down. And there was no correlation, actually. completely rigged, but people just blamed other people. And every single person in the group was like, I was the hard worker and everyone else is a slacker. And they found this result so many times. But yeah, in poker, it's such an important lesson to just realize that nothing is personal. You have to

put your ego out of the equation. Sometimes someone will raise you three times and he'll be like, oh my God, that person's picking on me. And maybe they are, but maybe they've had good hands. and maybe that's just good strategy because you've been folding. It's not personal. It has nothing to do with you. They're just a good player. So rather than complain and be like, oh, I can't believe that that person's bullying me, fight back. Yeah. Be like, okay, fine, I'm going to re-race and see what happens. Like, I'm going to try to adjust. I'm going to try to figure out what's going on because this isn't personal. And the moment you start taking it personally, your decisions just go haywire. Logic goes out the window. All of a sudden, you know, you're shoving all your chips in the middle with seven-duce offsuit, which, which you're which is the worst hand, you can be dealt in poker, because you got mad at this guy who keeps raising you. And you're like, oh, I'm going to take a stand. Fine. I have seven dues. I don't care. I don't care. I'm all in. And he flips over aces and you're like, oh, shit. That's called going on tilt, right? That is called going on tilt. Isn't that a beautiful expression? It kind of isn't it. Where does that come from, though? Is it like a tilting a game machine,

maybe, right? It comes from pinball. Oh, I've seen that on pinball machine. Yeah. So in pinball, you can tilt the machine right away. And so, Sometimes pinball machines, after people started doing that, would have tilt protection so that you actually can't do that. It disqualifies you from the game if you try to do that. I don't actually play pinball, so I'm not quite sure how it works, but I'm guessing that people who play pinball realize. There's a mercury switch in there, and if you move the machine, it usually just blinks and then turns off or it'll buzz or something like that. I see. So they probably actually did that in response to people tilting the machines.

Yeah, because if you flatten out the machine, you can just have it bounce wherever you want and you'll never lose, and then you can jack the high score up, which, you know, sucks for everybody competing. There you go. So that's where the term comes from. But in poker, it means getting emotional and letting emotions get into your decision process. And that comes from taking things personally and not realizing that, you know, it's not personal. I have to actually just look at the process dispassionately and make the best decision I can. So you can go on tilt. You can be tilted. Someone can be tilting to you. It's a wonderful word. You can use it in so many ways. You know, oh, my God, isn't that person's haircut so tilting?

You can use it that way. Exactly. That's funny. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show. We will be right back. Have you ever had a moment where you think, man, someone should really do something about this? Then you realize, maybe that someone is you. Well, with the help of GoFund Me, you can change someone's life.

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people. Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com. That's gofundme.com. Gofundme.com. Back. And now back to the Jordan Harbinger show. This is another concept that I've found myself using and never had a term for. I was recently in a lawsuit. One of the things we were able to do, unfortunately the other party wasn't acting in good faith. They were always trying to mess everything up. And I was like, okay, well, if this person's not going to get a real agreement, what we can do, if we can't predict that they are going to act in their own best interest, what I can do is predict that I can make them super angry and that they'll make bad decisions. And so I just started to do that. Well done. They were on tilt. That's a great skill. To be able to tilt someone is quite a skill. And I've had

it used against me. It's really important to realize that every single person can tilt. There's no one who's so just... Chill. Sanguine and chill that nothing gets to them. There is something that will tilt you at some point or someone because the days are long. You're so. You're sitting at the table for like 12, 13, 14 hours long, and then you have to wake up in the morning and do it again if you're doing tournament poker. It's exhausting. And when you're exhausted, when your resources are depleted cognitively and emotionally, things start getting to you more, right? You don't have the bandwidth to deal with it. You don't have the emotional resilience to deal with it. And so even if you're someone who's normally super chill,

when you're going on hour 13 and you haven't gotten any sleep and you haven't eaten that much, believe me, things are going to start affecting you. It's so important to try to figure out what your triggers are. What are the things that put you on tilt? How do you respond to certain common situations? How do you respond if you suddenly lose several large hands in a row and find that you've gone from like chip leader to short a stack? How do you respond in those situations?

It's important in advance to know the answer to that so that you have a way to solve it in the moment. Because in the moment, you ain't going to solve it. you're just going to make a bad decision. That's interesting. I did an interview years ago with Phil Helmuth, who's kind of famous for just freaking out at the table. Yes, the poker brat. Yes, the poker brat. And it's weird because I thought, oh, we better be nice.

Like, we're going to his house. We don't want him to get mad. He was so calm, chill, nice. It was like not what I expected at all as a very positive thinker. He's very different in his personal life than he is at the poker table. Yeah. Yeah. And I know you got a mental coach to sort of rein in your.

tiltage. What was going on there? How did that work? What did they teach you? Yeah. So his name was Jared Tendler. He's great. And he started out working with athletes. So he's someone who used to coach professional athletes still does, but expanded to poker players because poker is a sport of a kind. It's a mind sport, but it also requires a lot of physical stamina and good habits of hygiene and mind and body. just like for any athletic competition, this is an endurance sprint. So he, first I didn't think that I needed him. He reached out to me. He's like, hey, I heard you're working on this book project.

Let me know if you want to talk. And I looked him off and I was like, oh, great credentials. I don't need a mental coach. I've got a PhD in psychology. I'm great. And I'm female. I don't have the testosterone swings. I'm good.

It's those guys that need it. Exactly. It's the guys that need it. I don't need it. And oh my God, talk about hubris. talk about being a little bit overconfident. It ends up I did need a mental coach, as I found out after going on tilt a few times. The way that it worked was we would have these hour-long sessions where we would talk,

and he would actually get me to go through different play sessions where I could identify different things that made me emotional that I might not have even realized at the time. And it wasn't just even, oh, this kind of person makes me go on tilt. It was also the types of things like, when is my decision making off? And there were situations like, I know what the right decision is, but somehow I can't find that aggression. And so I can't run the bluff when I need to. And so I just fold what's holding me back?

What are my hangups? What's going on in my head? So he really forced me to identify those to dig deep. I would make Excel spreadsheets for him where I would like write down, okay, trigger. This is where it's coming from. This is how I'm going to work on it. this is what I'm going to do in the moment. It seemed like total BS when I was doing it, but it helped because it actually forced me to do the work and to identify these moments and to then

have a game plan because it's so important to understand that you can't develop a game plan in the moment. You need to have thought of it ahead of time. Otherwise, there's just too much going on and you're not going to be able to execute. He brought the concept of incidental events and how they affect our actions negatively, even if they shouldn't. The example you give is this weather example. through that. I thought this was fascinating, actually. I bet this happens to me every day and I just don't even know. Absolutely. The weather example is a really, really famous study in psychology by Schwartz and Clore. The effect is called mood as information. So we use our mood how we're feeling and we use that to actually make totally unrelated decisions. So in the weather study, this was really cool.

They called a bunch of people and asked how they were doing that day. That's it. But the way that they did it was they actually looked at zip codes and tried to figure out what the weather was in that area at that exact moment when they called. And so they picked some people where the weather was really sunny and others where it was raining or just overcast and pretty depressing. And they found that the weather totally affected the ratings of how well someone was doing and what they felt like, whether they were actually satisfied or not with their life, you know, just all of these mood ratings. But if they asked someone first, so what's the weather like there? And then they ask the question, the effect disappeared. So as soon as you actually drew their attention to where their mood was coming from, they discounted it. So it was a really powerful study because it shows that we make decisions and incorporate things that really shouldn't matter all the time, like the weather. We don't realize that we're depressed because it's raining outside. And instead we're like, oh, life sucks. Everything sucks. And we even make bad decisions when it comes. to financial decisions. There's a related study that shows that traders, that the stock market goes down

on overcast days oftentimes, and that if your sports team loses, you oftentimes will, once again, crash the market. And it's so interesting to see those types of things that don't matter at all. But the guys on the trading floor, you know, they're looking at the sports team. They care about the sports. And when your team loses, uh-oh, you know, all of a sudden, that's bad and it affects your mood, et cetera, et cetera. But it's also, so that part is a little bit concerning, but it's so cool that if you draw someone's attention to the incidental, to the reason why they're feeling this way, then they're totally capable of discounting it and saying, oh, okay, yeah, I'm depressed right now, but it's because of the weather. Is that one of the reasons why you're told never play straight off the plane when you get

to the tournament or Vegas? Like jet lag, you're hungry, you're tired. There's probably even other things going on. I don't know. Dehydrated. Absolutely. That's one of the rules that my coach had for me. Eric Seidel, never, never play off of a plane because you don't realize how compromised your decision making is. You've just traveled. You're probably in a different time zone. So your body hasn't adjusted. You're not well rested. You're not in the right mindset. You haven't had the right things to eat. Your body's just totally not ready. And in order to play your best game, in order to maximize your edge, you need to be the best version of you, which is a you who has eaten well, a you who has slept, a you who's on local time.

And I think it's such important advice for anything. If you're flying somewhere for a job interview, try to get there a day in advance so that you actually have a chance to acclimate a little and get your head straight and not go straight from the plane to the interview. We never do that. I mean, it's just go straight from the plane to the interview. But it would be so helpful if you did. You mentioned that there's a parallel between poker and in your writing and that characters

need to have motivations in writing. I was not good at writing when I was in college. So I assume you mean like characters and novels and things like that. Same in poker. Every player is telling his story consciously or unconsciously. And you finding out why these characters, aka your opponents or other people playing with you,

do things, why they act the way they did, that has some sort of value in the game as long as you can get the story but not judge is what you'd said. Can you explain this? So a lot of times we tend to just judge people. There's a joke in poker. I'm going to move up in stakes to where they respect my raises. Because I say, you know, that player sucks. He doesn't respect my raises. He's never going to fold. And some people actually say that and they're not joking. They're serious. And something that one of the people that I got to know very well and worked with quite a bit throughout this journey taught me, Phil Galfond, was it's so important to figure out everyone's motivations and the reason behind every single person's decisions.

What he said is always ask why. So he said two things. One, everyone is telling you stories and figure out what doesn't make sense. Figure out where do the story pieces not fall together? Because that's how you're going to figure out whether they're making sense or not, whether they're bluffing or not. But then he said, this is true of everyone. Do not be that person who's saying I'm going to move up in stakes to where they respect my raises. Do not be judgmental. Do not say, you know, oh, that person's just an idiot. They're stupid. They don't know what they're doing. Instead, try to figure out why are they doing what they're doing? Because even bad players have a reason for doing what they're doing. They're not just randomly doing it. And if they're doing it just randomly because they just want to, that's also a reason. If you can understand that, then you can take advantage of it. And not being judgmental is actually to your advantage, to your bottom line advantage, not just as a, I'm not a judgmental person. But it will help you. You will become a better player because you will understand that you can't look down at anyone. Everyone is a part of this.

Everyone's a part of the ecosystem. And if you're looking down at everyone, that probably means that there's something wrong with you. Yeah, that's interesting. That certainly rings true. You must spend a lot of time reading people, and I think a lot of folks are like, I hope they talk about reading people and tells and things like that.

I want to start, though, with online poker, because I know you played a lot online to just get a feel for the game with maybe the people element remove, but that didn't quite work out because you still have to read people in online poker, which I found fascinating. So not even there. Yeah, I found that fascinating too. I found it so interesting that we can actually make judgments about people based on how they're playing online. And this is a multi-tiered process. First, usually online, you get to choose your screen name and you

get to choose your avatar. So already that says something about the person. Then there's a chat function and some people choose to use it. And some people are not very nice in it. And right away, that also tells you something about the person. And oftentimes I'll see all these people in the chat after they've had a bad beat being like, oh, you're sucking out again. And they'll just go on a rant. Well, that just told me so much about your emotional reactions about how you process information. And then there are the tells that are things like, oh, this person sometimes bets this amount and sometimes that amount and they bet more when they have a stronger hand or vice versa. And if you learn to look at those things, you can actually see how people are acting. Yeah, you can't see

their gestures, but you can see things like that. You can see how long they take. Sometimes they act right away. Sometimes they'll take 10 seconds. Sometimes they'll use their time bank. What do all of these things mean? Those timing tells can be really important. So you end up being able to build a pretty interesting composite picture of a person. And I wouldn't give people labels. The first big tournament I won online was courtesy of someone who I had labeled AIA, which was aggressive idiot asshole. Because I'd played against him before. And not only was he an asshole to me, but he was an aggressive idiot. So hence the label. And it was true. And it actually informed how I played against him. And so, you know, I just let him bluff all of his ships off to me because I knew that he would

want to try to bully me. And he did. And that gave me the lead I needed to end up winning the tournament. I thank him in the book. I say thank you to the aggressive idiot asshole. It is fascinating because a lot of us, of course, now, especially that everyone's working remotely, we are dealing with a lot of people online in chats and an email, which we were before. But now, a lot of that human element is removed from pretty much everything. I mean, you thought you had a lot of conference calls before COVID-19. Like, what's going on now? Everything has context removed. So learning to read people without being in front of them is a skill in itself. How does that differ from reading people live at the poker table primarily? I mean, there's obviously more body language, but. Yeah, live,

you just have a lot more information. You do have the body language. And as I write about in my book, pay attention to hands. Hands are where it's at. It's not the poker face. It's the poker hands. That's where you actually give off most of your information. But anyway, so live, you have that, but you also have the dynamics. And yes, you have a little bit of this online, but it's much richer live. You can see who is being annoyed by whom. Who likes whom? Like, who's trying to prove that they're more macho than the other guy? You can start seeing those behavioral dynamics start emerging. And if you're good at spotting those, if you're good at seeing where the energy is at the table and how the energy is shifting and where there's bad energy, that really

helps you. All of a sudden, you can take advantage of it. And that's something that's much easier to do live. I like live poker a lot better. I think it's much more interesting. I think it's a lot more fun. I enjoy playing with people and reading people and I enjoy those interactions. And on the computer, it's just, it's a different world. Yeah, it's sort of seems like, it's like watching a movie on your phone versus going to a theater, maybe. I think it's even more extreme than that. Sure. But it's very true because you do want something where you are interacting with people. I mean, it's like having Zoom happy hour instead of actually going. A real happy hour. Yeah. Yeah, going to a real happy hour where everyone has their drink and I'm saying, hi, you know,

You know, it's better than nothing. That's true. But you'd prefer the real thing. So online poker for me is better than nothing, but I'd prefer the real thing. I guess maybe a better comparison would have been watching a sports game on your phone versus going and sitting at the court side at the... That's a very good one because the fans, there's so much energy there. And it's so funny to me.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on this, but I've been thinking a lot about how interesting it is that a lot of the sporting events now that don't have audiences will actually have audience noise. I wondered that they were going to do that. I thought, okay, are they going to add the proverbial laugh track, but it's going to be like a cheer track. Yeah. Yeah, it totally makes sense. So they've been doing that. They started doing that in Europe.

And to me, it's just, wow. Because I guess that it must affect the players as well. But it's so interesting. That's a good point. I never thought about that. I guess they just blast it over the sound system. And then the players look around and go, oh, right, there's no one here. I saw a story yesterday about an.

opera in Spain, and they had filled the opera house with plants. So instead of an audience, there were plants. Then they streamed the opera. It was a surreal thing. You see this huge auditorium filled with plants. So I just imagined a sports stadium with plants. Imagine how much work that would be to move a plant to every other seat. The air must be fantastically fresh in there, though. It must be. That was my first reaction to. I was like, whoa, who moved all these plants in here? Well, think about it. I'm moving right now to another house. So, lifting these plants, I'm like, oh, how many plants do we have? This is so irritating. Dirt is heavy. So imagine, dirt is really heavy. And I have like eight plants, okay? I don't have

800 or 8,000 plants. That's a whole lot of dirt. Whatever. Maybe they can leave them there for another year and it'll be worth it. Who knows? You did mention the hands. And I think a lot of people are thinking poker hand, like the cards you have, but you meant actual physical hands. Tell us about the new science of hand movement here. This is really incredible. So it ends up that we actually give up a lot of information from our hands. And it makes sense. Think about where your pulse is. Think about if you sweat, what part of your body sweats. We're used to controlling our faces. Everyone is used to the poker face idea. But we're really not used to controlling our hands. That's not something we pay attention to nearly as much. And so we don't

have as much practice at it. There was a really cool study that was done on poker players at the World Series of Poker, where this researcher at Columbia, Michael Slepian, had people who knew nothing about poker. It didn't really matter. You could know it something or not. He had to watch videos of the World Series. And what he asked them to do was say, who has a strong hand? And there were three different videos. One was a totally unaltered video where you just saw, you know, poker table and everything above it. So that's above the waist for anyone who's never seen televised poker. So you see faces, arms, hands, the whole deal. Then he did one cut where you could just see above the shoulders. So you were only looking at the face. And then he did one cut that was just kind of a little bit below the chest. So you could basically just see the hands and arms and what was going on at the table. It turns out that the people who could see everything were about at chance levels, which makes sense because we're about 50-50 at being able to tell if someone's deceiving us or not. So study after study shows that it's about a coin flip. So that makes sense. When they just looked at the faces,

it actually screwed them up. They were looking at the wrong things. So they became worse at chance at figuring out if someone had a strong hand or not because they were looking at the wrong facial cues because people will look at a face and be like, oh, that person looks trustworthy. You don't think of it consciously, but subconsciously that's going on. And so people were just screwing up. They were looking at the facial features and not at what they were supposed to.

And so they were worse than chance. But when they just looked at the hands, all of a sudden, their success rate went way up. And they could tell if someone had a strong hand, even if they didn't know anything about poker, just by the way that they handled their chips and the way they handled their cards and the way they placed their bets in the middle. And so Slepian said, wow, there's something in the gestures. And he thought in the smoothness and the fluidity. So people who are strong and actually confident as opposed to pretending to be confident move differently. And to me, that was so interesting. And afterwards, I was like, whoa, I'm just going to stare at everyone's.

hands now. Yeah, just going to look at everyone's hands. I'm sure there's plenty to be gained by that. Did you find any success with that or is that sort of new? Yes, I did. It's totally fascinating that it actually works. Not always. I worked with a coach who helped me on my tells as well. So I tried to get a coach for as many things as I could. Sure. Yeah, don't blame me. Coaches are good. They help you. And he just basically told me, stop doing things with your hands. Try to minimize what you're doing. Do not put like a card protector on your cards. Always check your cards. Always check your the same way and then leave your cards the same way. Don't recheck them. Don't do this. Don't play with your chips. Always place your bet out the same way. Just be very mindful of that. Most people don't do that.

You see all the time people riffling chips. Well, that's a hand gesture. Yeah. Oh, the riffling chips is where you sort of do some sort of fancy chip game. Exactly. And sometimes what you don't realize is when you're thinking, your rhythm's going to be interrupted a little bit because there's cognitive load. And so things like that happen. And it's so interesting to see. And sometimes people don't realize that they bet one way when they have a good hand and another way when they don't, when they are playing before the flop. So before any cards whatsoever, that's the time when people are least guarded, because there's really no money in the pot yet. Oh, so it's early, so they're not trying to hide anything. Yeah, it's early, so they're not trying to hide as much. It's so interesting to observe how

people will raise. Sometimes they'll raise, like, oh, I don't really care. And sometimes they'll raise like this is a real raise. Bam. Exactly. And that means different things. And it's so interesting to see and it's so interesting to realize that this is actually taking place. And like I said, not always, not for everyone, but it's there.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show. We'll be right back. Stay tuned after the show. We've got a trailer of our interview with Malcolm Gladwell, which is pretty timely right now. We'll discuss why the information we gather from face-to-face human interaction isn't as uniquely valuable as we think it is, and why television can actually make us worse at reading

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Subscribing to the show is absolutely free. It just means that you get all of the latest episodes downloaded automatically to your podcast player so that you don't miss a single thing. And now for the conclusion of today's episode. That to me is very fascinating because what it says about nonverbal tells, and tell me if I'm wrong, this is your department after all, but what it says about nonverbal tells is not only can we not turn these off, but it's not just about lying with our body or like wearing a hat and sunglasses. It's about giving people as little information as we can so they can't develop maybe a baseline.

And you mentioned in the book that Eric, your coach Eric Seidel, never showed his cards after a hand. I assume because he wanted to keep information from others. they couldn't use game tape and go, aha, when he has good cards, he does this. And when he has bad cards, he does it. Now he can't do that anymore. But yes. Now he can't do that. But at the beginning, he was infamous for this. People were really mad at him. He didn't want to show his whole cards to the camera in the earliest days of televised poker. And that was, yeah, because he didn't want to show his strategy. Information is power. And because Eric doesn't actually care about being famous,

he didn't care whether or not he was invited back. He didn't care if he was on TV. Like, you want me? Fine. I don't want to show my cards. And these days you can't. These days, it's just not a choice. You sign a little thing before you start. If there's a televised table that you're going to obey the rules, basically, which means showing your cards. That part never really hurt him because he's so good at changing his strategy around. But it was one of these things where it makes sense. What we talked about earlier, information is power. The more information you have, the better. The less information they have, the better. So both in terms of how you play hands and also in terms of how you hold yourself, what you do, just give people as little to go on as possible.

That's why I often I discourage people when they talk about, oh, well, what about speech play? You know, I want to try to get them to tell me what they have. So I'm going to engage in banter. And if you watch televised poker, you see a lot of people trying to do that. My advice is don't. Just don't speak during your hand because chances are unless you're really, really, really good at it. you're going to give off more information than you're going to pick up. Is that why you don't wear a hat and sunglasses and anything like that? I've heard you mention that you don't do that. I don't wear anything.

And I think, yes, because I think you do give off potentially more information than you pick up. It's so funny. And I'm going to say these things and then players will realize that they do them and they'll stop doing them and I'll hate myself. But they'll do things like they'll put their glasses on at certain moments and during certain hands and then they'll take them off. And you should have to start paying attention to when they're wearing them and when they're not wearing them. And they'll do things with their hat when they're serious versus not serious. It's so funny. And I don't think they're consciously aware. And maybe some of them, if they become aware, because someone told them, they're going to try to mix it up on purpose. But then inevitably,

they'll go back to their baseline, which is what they normally do. Right. It only works like one time and then it's like, okay, yeah. Or it looks very manual. So you lose more information than you hide when you wear a hat or sunglasses. Exactly. Yeah. But also, have you ever worn sunglasses inside in a not particularly bright room? Of course, yeah, when you walk in from taking a walk or something and you go, oh, I'm still wearing my sunglasses. Right. Can you see as well as you can without your sunglasses? Of course not.

Yeah, of course not, especially if your eyes have to adjust. It seems like a silly question, but I never get it. Like, you're wearing dark glasses inside. You're going to miss stuff. You're just not going to see things as well. Yeah, you have blind spots and stuff on them. Exactly. If you don't have the damn glasses on, I think it's so stupid.

Sorry people. Of course. Yeah. Look, that's their choice. You do use noise-canceling headphones, though, so you don't want to hear, you just want to see. Well, I often actually have them not turned on. It's a way of choosing which conversations I'm involved in. So think about a normal poker table. It's going to be, if we're playing eight-handed poker, it's going to be seven guys, a lot of them pretty big and me. So if someone wants to, like, pick a conversation and someone doesn't respond and that someone's one of the huge guys, what are they going to do? Nothing. They'll more. move on. But if I don't respond, they'll be like, hey, hey, I'm talking to you. Why I respond? Like, what? You're too good for me? Like, all of a sudden, there's the gender dynamic that and they feel like they can do that. And there's just social pressure. And sometimes I don't want to talk to them. I don't want to engage because they're annoying me or whatnot. And so putting on those headphones before you even sit down, it just gives you personal space because now it's socially acceptable

to pretend you didn't hear them. So you can actually either have them on and pretty low so that you can still hear everything, because I think it is important to hear things, or you can just have them off. But having them on your ears just gives you that space, gives you the option to just pretend you don't hear. And so they can't be like, hey, I'm talking to you. You can be like, yeah, I don't expect a reply. I've got these noise-canceling headphones on. And then the pressures on them, because it's almost like, you want me to take my headphones off so I can hear you say some dumb inconsequential thing. No. Exactly. So it switches the dynamic. Yeah, it puts the monkey on their back to like try hard for your attention, which means that it's just easier to go with the path of least resistance, which is either not to bother you or to bother somebody else or both. Exactly. Right. Did you have to learn to be more aggressive? And was that strange for you as a woman with certain social conditioning growing up?

It's something that I definitely had to work on and that I realized about myself. I realized that, you know, I have really internalized a lot of gender stereotypes because we live in a male-dominated society. So you kind of have to. If you want to do well, you have to pay attention and figure out, okay, how do I adjust my behavior so that everything is okay and so that I do well? And I had always thought, you know, oh, I know all about gender biases. I've studied the psychology of it. I've written about it. Like, I'm good. I'm a strong female.

No, that's, that was such delusional bullshit. It turns out that I had internalized so much of it. And I'd find myself sometimes with like the best hand possible. And I wasn't being aggressive with it. Like, I was just calling. I wasn't raising too much because I wanted people to think I was nice. I wanted them to like me. Oh, no.

I didn't want them to be like, what's that bitch, like, who keeps raising me? Yeah. Respect my raise. Yeah. Exactly. So even when I had good hands, I wouldn't win as much money. And then when I didn't have the best hand, I'd just fold. I'd be like, you know what?

You just take it. You just take the pot. I don't want any conflict. That is not a good way to play poker. No. But people did like you because you gave them a lot of money. Yes, they loved me. They wanted me in their games always.

But because I was losing money, it forced me to actually deal with this. It forced me to realize, hey, there's an issue here. There's a problem. I have to work on this. And so Eric, from the very beginning, he really stressed the need to up my aggression and to work with me on how I could use my image, which is a female, to be able to get away with things. There you go.

Okay, look at you. You're a girl. You're not as intimidating as these other people. Look at the other people at the table. Look at you. coming from you, this is going to seem very different than coming from that guy. So learn to use your image. Learn how to flip it on its head.

Learn how to use the fact that people are underestimating you. It was a while before I could follow that advice. But once I did, it actually helped me use the gender dynamics to my advantage rather than letting them bully me over. So poker's 97% male, 3% female in any given field. And that's about right. and it's been constant that way for a very long time. And so normally, you're the only girl.

You're the only female. And so once you figure out what your hangups are and how people are seeing you and if they're underestimating you and if so how, then you can just change your behavior completely. If they think that I'm not capable of bluffing, that I'm someone who's not capable of aggression, all right, now I can actually bluff a lot more. That's a good point. So once I figured that out, I could really up the end. aggression more comfortably, use it to my advantage, and start winning instead of bleeding chips

because I didn't want people to think that I wasn't a nice person. When we thin-slice people, our inputs are often wrong. I think I took that from your book. I'm not sure if that's an exact quote, but we look at things like facial expressions in our own experience, but our own experience pretty much has nothing to do with our current circumstances most of the time. The person with tattoos who looks like somebody who we think is scary from high school because they yelled at us when we walked by their gas station or like from the movies. This guy looks like the bad guy from that movie that I used to watch. That is nothing to do with reality. It doesn't make them a more aggressive poker player, right? This is some Malcolm Gladwell type is right here, I guess.

This is very true. I mean, what we need to realize is that every single one of us is biased. I mean, it's just the way that the human mind works. You form impressions of people right away the second you see them. And the second you see them, you don't know them yet. You don't know anything about them. So your impressions are necessarily based on things that don't necessarily correlate to who this person is. And so it will be things like tattoos and biceps in my case where I was like, oh, this guy's going to be an aggressive maniac. I'm not going to let him run me over. And it ends up that he was the most conservative player ever. And I made some very stupid mistakes. But you need to recognize that you are going to have these biases. So just,

like people see me and think, girl, I have to realize that I see them and I have certain impressions. You know, I see a nice older man and I'm like, oh, he looks like my grandpa. Exactly. Steam rolls you. Yeah, lies to your face. That's what happened. Oh, really? That's exactly what happened. Yes, nice little grandpa was like, ha, ha, ha, I'm going to bluff you. And then he just, he turned over the bluff. And I was devastated that grandpa's bluffing me. Was that the Siberian guy was like, I spent all my money coming here from the Soviet Union. You know, you're Russian too. And then he just smoked you. That was him. He was a nice little, he was, yeah, exactly, bastard. He was a

nice little grandpa-looking guy. He had me take a picture of him for his grandson. The guy pulled out all the stops. Oh, man, I'm such an idiot. That seems extra dastardly somehow. Like, do you think he went to everyone and planted this seed that he's like this cute little old guy just to like one time during the tournament, just steamroll them and plow them over? It's very, it's very effective. It worked. Yeah, I guess I shouldn't say it's extra dastardly. I mean, all is fair, I guess, right, in this game. Yeah, but I was the idiot. I was the sucker.

Look, that one's on me. I realize that you have to learn to recognize what information is actually important and what isn't. And if I don't know anything about someone, well, how can I make that determination because they've told me they're from Siberia? That's not based on how they're playing. That's not correct data. That data should be totally irrelevant. It's like you and I were just talking about incidental emotion. That's incidental data. I shouldn't care what his eyebrows look like or what his jawline looks like or what his biceps look like or, you know, what age he is. I shouldn't care about any of that. I should care about observing his behavior at the table and seeing how he's acting and how he's reacting. That's what I should be focused on. But it's so hard. A lot of these things are so, you don't even realize how deeply ingrained they are. You don't realize that you have the buttons that these people are pushing, right?

This is true. For all you know, it's like, did I say Siberia? I meant Saccharacter. Thank you for the photo. Exactly. Thanks for the photo and all that money. Yeah. Why don't you vent about bad beats and bad luck? I thought that was an interesting rule for you because you see that all the time when you watch poker on TV. And I rarely do.

But in the half an hour I've seen of poker in an airport lounge, all they did was wine. Right? Okay, it was Phil Helmuth, but still. You must be fun at parties, right? Yeah. Going back to that. Yeah. But it was a rule that Eric Seidel set for me very early on when I tried to tell him a bad beat story.

I was in the deepest I'd ever gotten into a tournament. So at this point, I had relocated to Vegas for a few months and was playing every day in these daily and nightly tournaments, you know, these silly little turbo things. But that's how I got my practice. That's how I learned to play live poker. And I finally, finally made the final table and was almost about to get my first cash, my first tournament cash. my first tournament cash. And I was so excited. And I ended up flopping a set, which means that I'm holding a pair, and there's a third card that matches my pair on the board. And that's huge. I mean, that's one of the best things that can happen. It's top set. I was ecstatic. I got all my

money in. And it didn't work out. Someone else ended up outdrawing me, and I busted. And I was so upset. And so I ran to Eric, and I started telling him this. And he just shut me up. He just said, wait, do you have a question about the hand? And I said, well, no, you know, I had a set. He's like, then shut up. I don't want to hear it. Huh. And I was just my jaw dropped open. I'm like, I'm your student. You're supposed to want to listen to my story. Emotional support. Yes, exactly. And he was like, no, this is bad. There are always going to be those guys who tell you how their aces got cracked. You are not going to be that person. That is like putting your trash on somebody else's lawn. And I was like, oh, huh, I guess you have a point there. He's like, I don't care. Because

the outcome doesn't matter. And at that point, he actually made a deal with me that not only was I never going to tell him a bad beat, he never wanted to know how a hand ended. He did not care if I won or lost because that was irrelevant. That's noise. That's the outcome. That's what happens to the cards. He only cared about my decision process. So he only cared about the moments in the hand where I had a question. And then he doesn't care what the other guy has unless it's important, unless there's some reason why we care what the other guy has. At that moment, it was infuriating because I wanted to tell him my bad beat story. But over time, I learned just how much of a gift he gave me, how liberating it was, because the bad beats, not only did I not weigh anyone else down

with that trash, it wasn't toxic to me. I would just let it go. In not focusing on the outcome, I let go of the thing I just couldn't control. And so I started forgetting them. I actually would no longer remember when I was knocked out of a tournament unless it was an interesting hand. If it was a standard hand and I got my money in, well, fine. I'd forget the hand. So the only hands I started remembering were the ones that were interesting, where I could learn something. And that was such an important point in my development because don't dwell on the shit that you can't control. Figure out what you can do. Figure out what you are actually capable of changing. Is this what Annie Duke calls resulting where if it works out, you decide this was good for me?

It's a little different, I guess, right? Whether your thought, process was correct based on the outcome, but what it seems like you were being taught here, other than not to vent and get into that negative headspace, is also not to look at something and say, I did something wrong because it didn't work out when in poker there's that luck element that you shouldn't focus. Absolutely. No, no. It's a very similar concept. Absolutely. I think that Annie's thinking in Betts really does articulate it nicely. You can't focus on the results. In fact, you should just dismiss the results because the results are noise. Unless if the results keep being bad over and over and over for a very long time, maybe you need to question your decision process.

Maybe there's something there. Maybe you're making some mistake over and over and over. So sometimes the results do matter. But in these types of situations, they don't. And I think it's also very important, not just with yourself, but when you're thinking about other people. So when you think, okay, does Mr. Smith make a good CEO? And we hire Mr. Smith because we did our work and we think he's going to be great. And then the company stock goes down within the year and we fire him. We're like, oh my God, we made a horrible mistake. Mr. Smith was awful. because the company's not performing well. Well, maybe he was doing everything right. And he was actually a great CEO, but there were other elements going on and were judging him on the outcome and firing him before he has a chance to prove himself and to prove that his strategy is actually working. But you know what? Look at what's happening in the market in general.

All companies like this are going down because of this external factor that has nothing to do with the fact that he's your CEO or whatever it is. even when we get over the hurdle of focusing on the outcome for ourselves, it's almost impossible to do it for other people. If someone else fails, we're like, oh, God, it's stupid. I can't believe they did that. It's so easy to judge other people based on results because they're not you. Yeah.

We're emotionally divorced from this situation because it's not our money or whatever, and we're going, this guy, he doesn't know anything. And then two seconds later make the exact same mistake because it's our money and it's our circumstances. Yeah. in the book you've also said being genuinely interested in other story is useful here we can get to the why behind their actions which is useful in terms of really understanding their motivations this kind of goes back to what i was talking about with the english and the writing and the parallels here but you said the biggest tells aren't physical but psychological that sounds kind of deep let's open

that up a little bit yeah people often think that when you're talking about tells you're talking about the things like we talked about earlier, hands or little motions. And that's true. Straightening my hat brim or whatever. Yeah. Exactly. Eating an Oreo. But is that really, is that a thing that someone does? No, just in the movie Rounders. Oh, right, right. I was like, I've seen that. Where have I seen that? Right. Hollywood fiction. Yes, you've seen it in Rounders. But oftentimes, the most important tells are how someone is feeling and reacting. And if you can tell what their emotional state is. So this actually goes back to when we were talking about tilt. Can you figure out not just your own triggers, but the other person's triggers? For instance,

almost everyone is going to have some sort of reaction to losing a lot or to winning a lot. Some people, when they lose a lot, they're going to become really cautious because they don't want to lose even more. Some people when they lose a lot are going to become extra reckless because they want to gain it back very, very quickly. Totally different. Same event, totally different reactions. Can I try to figure out what the psychological dynamic for this person is? How do they react to loss? Some people, when they win a lot, they're going to become extra cautious because now they don't want to lose it. They're like, oh, I have all these chips.

I want to guard them. Other people, when they win a lot, they're like, yeah, let's push my advantage. Let's go. I'm on a roll. Let's do this thing, which is this person. What's their dynamic? How do they react? If you can start to figure out and pull apart things like that, all of a sudden you have a really good psychological

picture of the person and you can take advantage of it. You can take advantage of them in the moments where they're. emotional equilibrium is off, when they're tilting a little bit, whether positively or negatively, where they're no longer going to be logical but are actually going to be making decisions that are bringing some of this emotion in. If you can figure out those psychological dynamics, you have such a strong handle on their tells on the things that are actually motivating them and how they play out in their decision making. That's all you're looking for in tells. You're trying to figure out, can I get deeper? Is this information about the person's decision process?

Earlier we talked about misinterpreting mood as information. I meant to ask, is that kind of like when I'm hangary, things look different? Yes, absolutely. The term hangary is brilliant, by the way. I don't know who coined it, but they should get some sort of linguistic metal. It's a real phenomenon. Yes, you actually get angry when you get hungry and you actually get emotional. You're not making decisions as rationally. Can I figure out what hunger does to you? Can I figure out what fatigue does to you? I figure out what all these different things do to your decision process? If I can, I don't even need to know your physical tells. I can just figure out where you are emotionally and use that. And by the way, I get hungry, but I just kind of get listless. My attention span goes away and I

I don't want to listen to anything. And sometimes I'll snap at people. So yeah, sometimes I'll actually get angry. Yeah. And all of a sudden I'm like, wait, wait, when was the last time I ate? Hold on guys. Do you carry food with you and like bust out a granola bar or something at the table? Yeah. Absolutely, always, especially because I have very low blood pressure. So it's something that I've always had to do because if it drops, I can faint. Yeah, well, it makes for great TV. There's that. And it makes for good literature. Yes. Yeah, fainting and face down in your chips, though, could be a little, could be something you'd never live down. Before we close here, there was an interesting note about superstition and gambling and why you should never start to believe this. And it seems like gambling has even more superstition than baseball and other sports. You see baseball players kick them out and then bat their cleats and then they do all these. But gambling, it's just everywhere. And I thought it was kind of this cutesy little stupid thing that doesn't really affect much. But you feel really strongly, or at least it seems so in the book, that you should never start to get into superstition and the psychological effect. I do feel very strongly about it. What's going on here? Why? Because I think it can affect you negatively. I think that you are giving up control when you

start believing in superstitions. And we already have limited control. Why would you give up even more of it? So if you have a lucky object and you misplace it the morning of an important tournament, that's going to affect your mental equilibrium. You might not think it does. You might think, you know, I'll bounce back because I know it's stupid. I know it doesn't really matter. But it's nagging there. And it's nagging in the back of your head. And all of a sudden you don't perform as well because there's a huge tie between your mental state and how you perform. And I tell a story about an Olympic athlete, a runner who didn't wear her lucky charm necklace during a race and blamed that for the fact that she lost and then won the next race when she wore the necklace. Interesting. We make our own luck when it comes to that kind of stuff.

When it comes to that thing, there's a huge mind-body connection. And one of the things I write about, which is really scary if you think about it, but also really cool is the nocebo effect. So everyone knows about the placebo effect that if you believe it something works, it works. There's also a nocebo effect. So there are people like if you believe that you can be cursed and that a witch doctor cursed you, you can actually kill yourself. So there are people who have just made themselves incredibly sick because they thought that they were cursed by a witch doctor. And then there's a really interesting study where some enterprising physicians decided to uncurse them. So they did like they made up words and did a reverse curse and the person got better.

There was a guy in a depression study. So the study had both an antidepressant and a placebo. and he one evening was just, he'd had enough and decided to take all the pills and was admitted to the hospital. They didn't think that he was going to make it because of the overdose because of his vitals were just crashing. Everything was crashing. So he took all the pills from the doctor? He took all the pills he had, yes. And then once he got admitted and he was crashing and people thought he wasn't going to make it, it turned out when they did blood work that he was taking the placebo.

So he took a bunch of sugar pills? He just took sugar pills. And once he was told that, he recovered. Wait, wait, wait. His vital signs were crashing because he thought he killed himself? Yes. And then he was like, oh, I just took sugar pills. I'm fine. That's how powerful our mind is. What? I would not believe that if you didn't tell me. If anyone else told me this.

Okay, I'm going to tell you one more, one more of these. There was a guy who was diagnosed with a fatal metastatic cancer and given two to three months to live. And he died within two months or something. They did an autopsy, and it ends up, he was misdiagnosed. He had a benign cancer and it couldn't have possibly killed him. Oh my God. So he did have cancer, but it was benign and it was treatable. But he thought he was going to die and so he just kind of gave up on life. I didn't even know that you could physically do that to yourself. You can physically. Our brain is so powerful. That's why I'm so anti-superstition because you do not realize what an effect you can have. And people are like, oh, but what about the positive effect?

I'm like, yeah, but what about the negative? Right. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it makes me me happier. Oh, and sometimes it kills you in a horrible way that was totally unnecessary. Like, it doesn't balance out. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, if you have a lucky shirt, what happens like if you forget to pack it for a trip? Yeah. What then? If you have any sort of lucky rituals, if you overslept and you can't do your lucky ritual, what now? Is it going to be bad? You're handing over power to something in a way that you don't have to do when we're already powerless in so many other areas. So why add another variable, right? Exactly. That's exactly right. You want to capture as much control as you can. You don't want to be giving it away to a lucky object and seating it and saying, oh, you know, I'm winning because of this. However, whenever anyone asks me, I have this set of dice that I trade out when I'm traveling and put one on the table. My niece gave them to me and it makes her really happy. I take pictures of them from around the world. I'm like, hi, here's the blue dye in Macau. You know, here's the green one in Barcelona. And that's why I do it. And a lot of

of times people like, oh, is that your lucky die? And I'm always like, yep, absolutely. Because if they think I have lucky objects, maybe they'll make a different impression of me. Ah, yeah. And they'll maybe try to swipe it and you're like, how, you think I'm going to be on till it because you took my die, but I don't care. My niece is going to claw your eyes out. Yeah. No, I'd be pissed. My niece got those from me from Italy. They're made out of glass. They're really beautiful. Oh, so you almost have, it's not a lucky thing, but it could still trigger you. Yeah, I'd be upset if someone still might die. Well, nobody steal the die. You just gave that out in public. Maybe we should edit that out. I don't know. Do you still play poker then? Are you still going?

I was going to be. So right now was supposed to be the World Series of poker and then COVID happened. But I'm actually going to New Jersey and July to play online for the World Series online. Oh, you have to go to New Jersey from New York because it's illegal. Exactly. Oh, isn't that interesting? And that makes a lot of sense, right? You cross a river? You can't just use like a VPN or something? I mean, no. I mean, I'm very much a stickler for not going to. into the shades of gray.

It's not worth losing your winnings and possibly going to jail because you couldn't cross the river. That's exactly right. It's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. Why not switch then from writing books to just playing professional poker entirely? Because I love writing. I mean, that's what gets me going. It's what keeps me going when I don't write.

I feel like there's a big hole missing. So I will always be a writer. Well, you're a great writer. I loved this book. I recommend everybody grab it. The links in the show notes. I read the whole thing and I plowed through it and it was really a pleasure to read. So thank you so much for coming on the show today, Maria. Always good to see you. Thank you so much for having me back, Jordan. I always enjoy our conversations. Fantastic show. I know we went a little long. Go get this book, people. Maria is a great writer. You're going to enjoy listening to or reading it. And if you do go and grab this book, please do use our website links. It helps support the show. But you'll enjoy this read. Even if you don't care about poker, you don't care about gambling. which for me, for sure, I'm not in that camp. I don't even play Blackjack.

I didn't care about any of that stuff. I loved this book. Also, one of the things that we talked about offline after the show was that venting and complaining about luck or bad luck, as we mentioned on the show, it actually damages your social relationships. We didn't get to that during our conversation, but those social relationships provide support and opportunity in your life.

You know, you get opportunities for jobs or deals or projects or to meet other people and expand your social circle. negative impressions like venting, complaining about bad luck in your life outside of poker entirely, that has a limiting effect on opportunity in your life. Bad social habits limit opportunities. So it doesn't have to be venting or complaining about bad luck, but just be aware of the type of vibe you're putting off because it's actually bad if you're repelling people. Now, that should be really obvious, but I don't think, I didn't even think about how negative behaviors affect social relationships and how that actually limits opportunities.

And I guess that's because I never thought about exactly the correlation between opportunities and how many social relationships you have. You'd think that would have dawned on me running a course like six-minute networking, which is all about connecting to people in order to generate opportunities. I love the way that this was explained in the book as well.

Even being aware of bias doesn't necessarily mitigate that bias. This is another concept that we didn't get to, but this is amazing. So what this means is if you think that because you know you're subject to bias, that you yourself can control that bias, you are wrong. So if you think, oh, well, this is confirmation bias, this, that, and the other thing, that doesn't happen to me because I listen to these podcasts or I read books by Daniel Connaman and Maria Konnikova, so I don't have bias. That doesn't work.

Science shows being aware of bias does not necessarily mitigate that bias. So be aware of your bias that you might not have any bias. How's that? Again, fascinating episode. This is what makes me love doing this show for you guys. Episodes like this. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes, transcripts are in the show notes, there's a video of this interview on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. And don't forget six minute networking is over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get thirsty. Those relationships, those opportunities, well, they come when you work for it. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is right now. And insert other cliches here. But anyway, it's free.

It's at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. You all know my spiel on that. And by the way, most of the on the show, actually subscribe to the course and the newsletter. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. And if you liked this episode, reach out to Maria Konnikova. Show guests love here and from you. We'll put her socials on the website as well. And speaking of social, I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. Add me on LinkedIn. I'm posting there right now. Thank you for listening. This show is created in association with Podcast One, and this episode was produced by Jen Harbinger, edited by J. Sanderson, show notes for the episode by Robert Fogart, video editing by Ian Baird, transcription by Milio Campo.

The ads were fun because of Peter Oldring, music by Evan Viola, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Our advice and opinions and those of our guests are their own, and I'm a lawyer, but not your lawyer. I'm sure as heck not a doctor or a therapist. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. And remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends

when you find something useful or interesting. Know somebody who plays poker? They love this. Know somebody who's interested in psychology and decision-making. they'd love this. Hopefully you find something great in every episode. Please do share the show with those you love. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen. And we'll see you next time. Young African-American woman is in Texas, just has a job interview in a rural Texas town, Sandra Bled.

And she's pulled over by white police officer. They have a conversation. You mind putting out of your cigarette, please. It quickly escalates. I'll remove you. I'm giving you a lawful order. Okay, you go get me out of my car. Drags her out of the car. I will light you up. Get out now.

If she's put in prison, and three days later, she commits suicide in herself. If she's in an Audi, her chances of being pulled over are lower. And if she's in an Audi with Texas plates, she's fine. Most of all, if she's white, there's no way he's pulling her over. And as I describe in the book, all of those inferences are deeply problematic. We have enormous confidence in our ability to draw meaningful conclusions about people based on very superficial evidence. Even though the plots of friends are absurdly complex,

no one in history has ever watched an episode of friends and said they lost me. What is going on in the show? Yeah, never happened. They do that because they're trained actors. If you watch a lot of TV, you can come to the false impression, but that's what's going on on your face.

But in truth, that's not true at all. And a significant number of people are what are called mismatched, and that is that their facial expressions under certain circumstances do not match the way they feel on the inside. The Amanda Knox case, an American teenager goes to a year abroad in Italy and gets falsely accused of murdering her roommate. And that case is all about the fact that Amanda Knox is mismatched. They have another guy who clearly did it, and they drag her in.

Why? Because she doesn't behave the way the Italian police and the British tablet press think someone whose roommate has been murdered ought to behave. We are sending people to jail for years and years and years for crimes they had nothing to do. You had kids. I mean, she was like a college student. In college student, yeah. For more from Malcolm Gladwell, including how the misunderstandings between people and cultures invite conflict. I told you this was timely. Check out episode 256 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think,

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